Posted on: 24 Dec 2023
“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” This chillingly memorable quote from George Orwell’s Animal Farm has warned generations of readers about the dangers of revolutionary movements descending into totalitarian cruelty. The story of an animal revolt at Manor Farm was, famously, a thinly veiled allegory of Russian Communist history. It […]
Posted on: 28 Nov 2023
When do college decisions come out? If scenes in coming-of-age high school movies are to be believed, they arrive suddenly, ratcheting up dramatic tension. The more prosaic reality is that these decisions come out in stable patterns, helping you predict when they will arrive. Admittedly, having this knowledge doesn’t necessarily make the wait feel less […]
Posted on: 23 Sep 2023
The (tech) kids are alright. Given the centrality of technology in today’s world, nonprofits, government agencies, and corporations are keen to foster youth tech skills. To that end, these organizations host a dizzying number of computer science competitions at local, national, and international levels. Whether your passion lies with competitive computing, hackathons, robotics, or app […]
Posted on: 31 Aug 2023
Shirley Jackson is best remembered for her sharply critical, feminist deflation of broadly accepted norms of mid-twentieth-century American life. It is a great irony that her most incendiary of works, “The Lottery,” is now a widely taught classic. When Jackson’s short story was published in The New Yorker in late June of 1948, both the […]
Posted on: 02 Aug 2023
“Googleable” and “searchable” are both forms of internet slang that describe the ease of locating data or people online. As words, they seem difficult to think of outside of our smartphone present. But these neologisms of the digital age are also part of a very old grammatical tradition. Like so many words before them, they […]
Posted on: 29 Jul 2023
What does it mean for a political speech to be “equivocal”? In the absence of Google, you could use the prefix in equivocal to understand its definition. Prefixes are parts of words that are added at the beginning of base or root words to change their meaning. For example, “equi-” is one of the most […]
Posted on: 15 Jul 2023
If you haven’t read Lord of the Flies, the 1954 novel by Nobel-prize-winning British author William Golding, you may still recognize its oft-cited title. Ever since its publication, Golding’s tale of a group of young boys stranded on a desert island and the ruthless infighting that ensues has become a critical shorthand for stories of […]